Articles of Faith series: I. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity.

So here is the first article of faith held by the Anglican Church:

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

I formerly held a Unitarian, or Arian, perspective concerning Christology and believed that God the Father and Jesus the Son were separate individuals. I believed, along with other Biblical Unitarians (as opposed to Unitarian Universalists - very different breed, though they have related origins) that Christ was a created being, specifically created prior to the creation of anything else, and then was instructed on the Father's ways, eventually becoming God's masterworker. I think this is at least a healthier, and more robust and Scriptural view, than some other Christologies among certain Unitarian sects, such as the human Jesus theology, and the Arian Catholic perspective that Christ was a spiritually pre-existent being but that Joseph was still the physical father of Christ. The created, pre-existing Christ (Logos) is a position I still think is somewhat defensible, but the arguments which try to get around his pre-existence are simply disingenuous and suggest, to me, a lack of intellectual integrity concerning what the Scriptures say and what it means to be a Christian. Of course, you are free to believe what you want about Scriptures, but the standard of interpretation that results in things like human Jesus theology (which asserts this is a teaching of Scripture) really fail in my opinion.

I am not going to present a full argument for the Trinity, because that is not the purpose of these commentaries. I recommend reading Augustine's On the Trinity, Boethius's Opuscula Sacra, and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity if you are interested in seeing some good arguments in favor of the Trinity from a Scriptural and rational position. Briefly, I came to see that the standard Trinitarian perspective of three persons in one God was not repugnant to reason from several different things. My thoughts concerning Baruch Spinoza assisted in this regard, though my position as a Trinitarian is obviously not dependent on the thoughts of a philosophical pantheist. But it occurred to me that God uses temporal things to speak of eternal things for a reason - the Father-Son relationship being the key one in Scripture. We become sons (or daughters) in contexts where parent-child relationships have already existed - they are new in token, not in type. The divide between Creator and created is that the Creator provides the type - He dispenses it through His miraculous creation, and the "relatio" between human beings is directly related by Christ in John 17:21-24 to the "relatio" Jesus has with God - a oneness of relationship that transcends time and space. Granted, God could have created the type of relationship in creating Christ, but the oneness Christ wishes for his Body is a created oneness, that is a mirror of eternal oneness - for in the beginning, the Word was, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Anyone who has felt deeply divided on a subject has felt what it is like to feel like two people - but that is a fallen, broken parody of the threefold personhood in the "object" of God (I speak loosely here, for in the strictest sense God is not an object among many), a perfect relatio between three subjects who subsist in the same object. No analogy can capture this notion, nothing does it justice - it is not irrational but superrational, a full and perfect union of Persons possible only in God. In addition to realizing the eternal nature of Christ's relationship to the Father, as providing the type rather than being the token of a type, I realized the strangeness of the command to venerate Christ, who came and died for us, but not to worship him - which happens in the Scripture, and Christ does not warn them off from it, neither Thomas nor the women who worship him. Unlike the Angel in revelation, he does not reprimand such behavior. Why should the Father allow this unless, in worshipping Christ, we worship also the Father? Why would he put us at risk for idolatry, unless worshiping Christ simply was not idolatry? This is different from a Problem of Evil argument, like, why would God let bad things happen to good people? This is - why would God make the fundamental path to salvation a potential breach of the First Commandment and in some sense the Only Commandment? If Christ can say he is the only Way, Truth, and Life, and no one shall get through the Father except through him, how can we escape lifting Christ up in our hearts in the process of worshiping the Father that also worships the Son? Perhaps I speak from an emotive rather than a purely logical perspective, but I do not believe it is truly possible.

I think, moreover, that this is as fulfilling and unifying a concept, as conducive to making life more rational, as the concept of God in general is, as fundamental to my reality as love, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, belief in the value of logic, faith in humanity, and other things which are simply necessary to get on in the world. In The City of God, Augustine discusses how Plato believed in the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Christ said, "Why do you call me good? Only your Father in heaven is Good." He also claimed himself to be the Truth. And the holy spirit, the Person who moves us to do good works, moved the writers of the Psalms to write their poetry, moves the Church to bow before her God, is surely beautiful. Augustine goes on to discuss that Plato divided learning into three categories, natural philosophy, abstract philosophy and moral philosophy. That is to say, there are three questions - What is reality like? How is truth to be known from the false? What ought I to do? These are the primary questions, the fundamental questions of all inquiry, and, Augustine says, we need them all - they all inquire into one truth, but must be kept distinct within that search for a unified truth if they are to be effective. No answer to one question which renders the other two absurd can be accepted. The Trinity, like the sun, is an idea too big for the mind's eye to fully grasp - we can contemplate it as best we can, but believing it as we look on the world, it becomes a light to the mind, creating paths through the tangled webs of darkness cast by the world and our own human failings. The Trinity is an eternal example of reconciliation, of difference brought to unified wholeness rather than destruction, a model for peace between separate Persons unparalleled in any cultural leader for peace the world has seen in any other context. With the Trinity guiding our thoughts on epistemology, different positions can be seen as modes within a whole framework rather than simply rival ways of knowing. With the Trinity guiding our politics, people who have different views become fellow members of Christ's body that we seek to reconcile ourselves to rather than declare triumph over. With the Trinity guiding our personal lives, we seek balance, never letting a single opinion go unassailable, for the Ultimate Reality is not so small minded and will not tolerate such small mindedness in us. Thus I ardently affirm this first, essential article of faith, as a Christian, an Anglican, a human being.